In an age of instant world-wide communications, some might ask why we still need IT conferences. It turns out that no matter what people say, nothing beats being in the same place as a large number of people with similar interests. The learnings and interactions go well beyond anything you get from reading a manual or watching a webcast. Casual interactions with people in the hallway will vastly broaden your horizons, and help build up useful network connections that may help for the rest of your career. For vendors, the showroom floor offers great opportunities to introduce customers to your products and establish new connections.

HP has recently released a free version of HP NNMi. This gives you a perpetual license to run NNMi, with some limitations. It’s not completely crippled freeware, and may be worth a look if you want basic fault monitoring in a lab or small network.

Many network faults I see are quite preventable, or could have been fixed far sooner, if basic network ‘hygiene’ had been maintained. Major faults are often the result of multiple small faults. Fix the small problems, and you won’t get as many of the big problems. It’s not glamorous, and you won’t be seen as a hero for solving that production problem, but you will sleep better, and the network will run smoother. Here’s my top 10 tips on maintaining good network hygiene:

Watch out if you have HP NNMi integrated with HP Operations Manager, and you’re upgrading to the latest Operations Agent. I have a customer using HP Network Node Manager 9.22, with HP Operations Manager for Windows 9.0. Both of those systems are running the latest publicly released patches. They are integrated using the Operations Agent method, where NNMi sends SNMP traps to the local Operations Agent on port 5162, which then forwards NNMi incidents as Operations Manager messages.

If you have a strong Cisco background, then you immediately think of Spanning Tree Protocol when you think of Layer 2 loop protection. Or if you’re keeping abreast of the newest developments, you think of TRILL and SPB. But there are other mechanisms for helping detect loops at layer 2. Here’s one I came across while studying for HP Master ASE: HP Procurve Loop-Protection.

Recently I was upgrading an HP 2910al switch from 14.70 to 15.08.0012. I used IMC to load the new firmware, rebooted the device, waited…and nothing. Device went offline, and never came back. Ruh roh. It was only a lab switch, but still, it meant I needed to go and hook up a console cable, to see what was going on. Luckily the fix wasn’t too difficult, and I got things back up and running quickly.